Justice Delayed Justice Denied

The brutal murder of a young African-American woman during the civil rights era has long fueled one small Indiana town’s reputation as a hive of racist hatred.

Carol Marie Jenkins of Rushville, Indiana had been selling encyclopedias door-to-door in Martinsville when she was found stabbed to death on September 16, 1968. Though the crime eventually went into the cold case file, it was generally attributed to local racist sentiment—90 cars and numerous robed marchers had participated in a Klan rally in downtown Martinsville just the previous summer.

For more than thirty-four years the murder of Carol Marie Jenkins remained unsolved. But on May 8, 2002, police arrested Kenneth C. Richmond, a 70-year-old career criminal with a history of bizarre behavior and affiliation with groups such as the KKK.

Investigators said Richmond was implicated in the crime by his daughter, Shirley Richmond McQueen, who witnessed the slaying as a child.

State police detectives, working in a "cold crimes" squad, were led to McQueen by an anonymous letter. When questioned, they said, she finally confirmed what the letter alleged that as a 7-year-old, she had watched from the back seat of a car as her father and another, still unidentified man killed Jenkins.

Detectives said they were convinced of McQueen's story in part because she remembered a key detail which had never been made public -- that Jenkins was wearing a yellow scarf.

McQueen, by then 40, reportedly gave Indiana State Police detectives the following account: Jenkins began to flee when she saw the two men running at her. The other man held Jenkins while Richmond grabbed a screwdriver from the front seat in their car and stabbed her, McQueen said she still recalls what her father said when he returned to the car: "She got what she deserved." When they got home, her father gave her $7. One dollar for each year of her life -- to keep quiet about what she had seen. But Richmond never went to trial for Jenkin's murder. He was declared incompetent to stand trial and on August 31, 2002 he died of cancer.

Sources: Indianapolis Star article written by Diana Penner (2002); Indiana Public Media article written by Yael Ksander (2007)